News

KPhotoAlbum 4.7.2 released30 Jul 2016

We are pleased to announce the new release KPhotoAlbum 4.7.2 of the photo management and tagging application for KDE.

Version 4.7.2 will likely be the last release of the 4.x series, which depends on KDE 4 and Qt 4 libraries (of course if we don't find some severe problem). We will now mainly focus on the KDE Frameworks and Qt 5 port of KPhotoAlbum (of which the first beta release will be done soon, it already works quite fine!).

This release only contains bugfixes and usability improvements, no new features or big changes. So, everybody is encouraged to use the new version. From the ChangeLog:

  • Bugfix: Fix building without KIPI.
  • Bugfix: Annotation dialog: Fix up/down key if there's a single match for an entered string.
  • Enhancement: Tag names are now matched word by word against all parts of the search string (using the Search dialog).
  • Bugfix: Prevent duplication of special categories when updating to dbv7.
  • Bugfix: Don't exclude "Z" when filling the "Tokens" category for the first time.
  • Bugfix: Overall fixes of assertions.
  • Change: Dropped compatibility with libkipi < 2.0.

This time, Johannes Zarl-Zierl and Tobias Leupold contributed to the code, but also thanks to the users that reported bugs and/or proposed patches! Keep on doing so :-)

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 4.7.1 released26 Feb 2016

We are pleased to announce the release of KPhotoAlbum 4.7.1, a new version of the photo management and tagging application for KDE. This is mostly a bugfix release. Some regressions caused by the category localization removal did not catch our eye before the last release, but have been fixed now in 4.7.1. Everybody is encouraged to use this version instead of 4.7, as, most notably, parts of the category settings dialog – and thus a central functionality of KPA – were broken in 4.7.

The list of contributors is quite short this time, it's only Johannes Zarl-Zierl and Tobias Leupold, but also many thanks to the people that reported bugs!

Here's the ChangeLog:

  • Bugfix: Fix broken category settings dialog (categories can be added, renamed etc. again, was a regression of the category l10n removal).
  • Bugfix: Fix i18n problems with special categories.
  • Bugfix (#358971): Make import/export file filter translatable.
  • Bugfix: Fix overflow in viever cache size computation (Thanks to Robert Krawitz for pointing this out!).
  • Bugfix: Fix crash on i386 due to an uninitialized static variable (Thanks to Matthias Heukäufer for reporting the bug!).
  • Enhancement: Various improvements on the EXIF DB.

Have a lot of fun with KPhotoAlbum :-)

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 4.7 released19 Jan 2016

We are pleased to announce the release of KPhotoAlbum 4.7, a new version of the photo management and tagging application for KDE.

This release contains a lot of new features, changes and bugfixes. Most notably:

Removal of translatable "standard categories"

KPhotoAlbum starts with a set of so-called "standard categories" ("People", "Places", "Events"). Those had two names: the English name, which was also stored to the database, and a display name, which could be another one if KPA was started with another locale than English.

This approch (which seemed to be a nice idea if e. g. the database was shared between people speaking different languages) led to several problems. We tried to fix them via the last releases, but after all, some of these problems could not be solved. So we decided to remove the dual handling of a storage and a display name. The displayed name is now stored as such in the database.

This probably leads to some non-English users seeing some of those categories with a different name when starting up KPA 4.7. Of course, the "new" names can simply be changed to their "old" translated version. Sorry for the inconvenience, but this was the only way to finally get rid of the category localization problems.

GPS search

It is now possible to search images by their GPS position. the search dialog now contains the same map as the annotation dialog, and a rectangle can be drawn on it, resulting in KPA searching for images within this rectangle (in addition to the other conditions).

Thanks to Reimar Imhof for writing the initial patch implementing this!

Browser category drag and drop support

Categories can now be organized via tag groups by dragging and dropping them using the browser, in addition to the tag groups settings page.

Other changes (from the ChangeLog)

  • Bugfix: Various fixes of compilation failures on different distributions/gcc versions, as well as various fixes of crashes caused by regressions.
  • Enhancement/UI: The category settings dialog doesn't tell the user anymore that he must save the database now after renaming categories. Instead, the saving is done automatically now, and category name changes can only be done on a "clean" (saved) database, so that no unwanted changes will be auto-saved.
  • Enhancement: Better performance for single- and dual-core processors when creating thumbnails.
  • Enhancement: Various enhancements for tne RAW support.
  • Bugfix (#348096): Fix crash when accessing an image via KIPI plugins which has been deleted from the disc, but not yet from the collection.
  • Bugfix: Don't crash if a category is renamed or deleted which holds the currently selected "untagged images" tag.
  • Bugfix: If a category holding tag groups was renamed, the tag groups were lost.
  • Enhancement: Added a "mark as untagged" action, as proposed by the patch of Reimar Imhof.
  • Bugfix: Several fixes about the "untagged image" tag (counting, visibility etc.)
  • Bugfix: Fix crash: Decrease the rowCount of the items list when an item is skipped due to a filter input so that KPA won't crash when an empty row is clicked (and the row count actually matches the number of displayed items).
  • Enhancement: Add python script to show birthday info. Also Bugfixes.
  • Enhancement: Enable exif search for lens data. Also various enhancements in the general handling of EXIF lens data (esp. better lens info for generic canon lenses).
  • Enhancement: Display the image's aspect ratio in the ctrl-i image overlay.
  • Bugfix: Ignore empty input while quick-tagging.
  • Enhancement: Add "link images" to context menu.
  • Bugfix: Fixed copy tags from last image (tags already associated with an area were added to the candidate list when they shouldn't be).

Thanks to everybody involved

According to git log, the following individuals contributed to this release (in alphabetical order):

  • Andreas Neustifter
  • David Faure
  • Jesper K. Pedersen
  • Johannes Zarl-Zierl
  • Miika Turkia
  • Pino Toscano
  • Reimar Imhof
  • Robert Krawitz
  • Tobias Leupold
  • Yuri Chornoivan

Thanks for putting your work in this release!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 4.6.2 released19 May 2015

We are pleased to announce the release of KPhotoAlbum 4.6.2, a new version of the photo management and tagging application for KDE. This is mostly a bug fix release.

The main reason for this release is a changed procedure when the recently introduced database update is done (as said, it's an internal update which fixes some flaws with localized category names that have been around for ever, and it won't show up to the user at all). A backup of all probably changed files is created automatically so everybody could revert to the previous state (and an older Version of KPA) nevertheless, and the update is done automatically now.

Bug fixes and changes

  • Bugfix: Fixed several compilation issues for various distributions and/or gcc versions.
  • Bugfix: Fix month plural when formatting age.
  • UI: Show the number of trained faces on the Face management settings page.
  • Enhancement: Add AfterShot2 to open-raw.pl.
  • Change: Do the dbv6 update without asking the user. But create a backup of all (probably) changed files before. Hopefully, this will be more (end-)user friendly and everybody gets a backup for free :-)
  • Bugfix: Hide the "untagged image" tag also when typing in parts of it's name.

Thanks to everyone involved

According to git log, the following persons comitted changes (in alphabetical order):

  • Dominik Stadler
  • Miika Turkia
  • Rex Dieter
  • Tobias Leupold
  • Yuri Chornoivan

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 4.6.1 released18 Mar 2015

We are happy to release KPhotoAlbum 4.6.1, a new version of a photo management and tagging application for KDE. Read on to learn about latest changes. This is a release dedicated to bug fixes.

Bug fixes

Below you can see a list of fixed bugs and enhancements:

  • UI: Moved the birth date dialog to the settings and added more functionality (typing the date directly, sorting by tag name or date).
  • Bugfix (#344462): Don't build thumbs when new image finder is cancelled.
  • Bugfix (#344419): When a new tag is added, select this very newly added tag, not the first tag that contains the new tag's name (which can as well be another one).
  • Improvement: better wording for DB upgrade messages.
  • Bugfix (#343822): Prevent KPA from crashing when a tag is dropped between two other tags and not onto one.
  • Bugfix (#342510): Fix crash with face recognition with some tag hierarchies.
  • Fix evaluation of GPS data for some cameras.

Thank you everyone involved

This time the list of contributors is surprisingly short. Thank you Tobias Leupold and Johannes Zarl for the work you put on this release.

— Miika

KPhotoAlbum 4.6 released02 Feb 2015

We are happy to release KPhotoAlbum 4.6, a new version of a photo management and tagging application for KDE. Read on to learn about latest changes.

Age view

One of the new features is Age View. This allows you to add the birth date of people on the pictures. Then you can see the age of the persons in the pictures at the time the photo was taken. A really cool feature especially when watching the toddlers grow. Take a look at a demo video to see what it is all about.

Face detection

Face detection and recognition has been requested for ages. And now it has finally landed in KPhotoAlbum. Now it should be even easier to tag the photos with the assistance of face recognition. Again this is demonstrated on a video, enjoy.

New features, bug fixes and other enhancements

Below you can see a list of other changes and bug fixes, which is far from complete.

  • Enhancement: Allow incremental building of thumbnail cache.
  • UI: Add slider for resizing the thumbnail grid.
  • Enhancement: Show a message if the untagged tag feature is misconfigured.
  • Bugfix(#322514): Allow resizing of thumbnail grid without rebuilding the thumbnail cache.
  • Bugfix(#334393): Handle image path correctly when importing from a .kim file.
  • New Feature: Display images on a map (available in the annotation dialog and in the image viewer)
  • Change: Rename old category names in the database. "Persons" becomes "People", "Locations" becomes "Places".
  • Change: new database file version is 6.
  • Enhancement: better performance on NFS (#340127).
  • Bugfix(#340963): better handling of the '&' character in folder names.
  • Enhancement: Improved category and tag groups (subcategories) pages in the settings dialog.
  • New Feature: Face detection and recognition using libkface.
  • Bugfix(#338870): Display a dialog if index.xml has a syntax error.
  • New Feature: Specify the birth date for people (or any other category item for that matter) in Maintanence->Edit Birth Dates, and see their age when viewing images.
  • New Feature: Add a context menu option to copy images from the thumbnail view.

Thank you to everyone involved.

Git log shows that the following individuals have contributed to the new version. Thank you everyone, and thank you everyone not on the list who have contributed in other ways like translations, documentation, testing and so forth!

  • Johannes Zarl
  • Tobias Leupold
  • Jesper K. Pedersen
  • Pino Toscano
  • Yuri Chornoivan
  • Miika Turkia

— Miika